follow your passion!

My reading kick about elite sport has involved a serious sub-kick on women’s skeleton (it’s like luge, only headfirst). Great Britain has won the gold medal in women’s skeleton the last two Olympics; both times it was the only gold medal the UK won. 2014’s winner was Lizzy Yarnold, a 25-year-old who’d only been in the sport 5 years. Her story:

Yarnold’s sporting path to glory was changed forever when she attended a UK Sport Girls4Gold initiative, where highly competitive sportswomen were chosen for specific sports if they showed the attributes to become a potential Olympic champion.

Yarnold was a promising athlete at school in Kent, excelling at heptathlon, and enjoyed horse riding and diving. But she admitted to BBC Sport: “At the Girls4Gold selection, I desperately wanted to be picked for modern pentathlon. But they said I’d be more suited to skeleton instead. I must admit I’d never heard of it but I’ve never looked back since.“